Review my socket game app: Kwissle | Hacker News Reader

Review my socket game app: Kwissle

kwissle.com

25 pointspeterbe23 comments

I'd suggest not forcing a signup to use the game. People just don't have the time to signup again for a game they don't even know if it's worth it.

Good point! I was thinking, I could probably make the Play available and if they're not logged in it could automatically create an account for them called something like anonymous1281

This is so much fun!

It would be great to know how many people are currently online. I played three matches, each time against the same person - who I presume was selected randomly, so there can't have been that many people playing.

Also, does it automatically disconnect your opponent? I'd often like to demand a rematch, but every time it says "JSmith has disappeared!" - I don't know if that's because all my opponents hate me but there should be an option for a direct rematch.

Finally, I found sometimes the countdown timer when an opponent can still answer flickers randomly between actual time left and around 12-15 seconds. It's hard to describe but there's definitely something wrong there.

Thanks Jack! The site suffers a little bit of a chicken-and-egg problem in that it'll be more fun when more people are online and when there's more questions. Working on promoting it :)

The problem with opponents disappearing is unfortunate. A lot of times it happened because people accidentally went back one page when they hit the Backspace key. It's getting better.

I too have spotted some bugs with the game play "announcements". They're in my TODO.txt :)

You should override the default behavior of Backspace, because if someone is not in the input field, Backspace will abort the quiz and take them back to the previous page (in most browsers).

Maybe the multiple choice option should only become available after a certain amount of time?

I would decrease the time a user has to fill in an answer. Where there is competition there is generally cheating (who would do that right? I know), and you want to prevent GoogleIntellectuals from doing just that.

I really don't know how to solve the Backspace. Probably, the only way to catch that is to have some sort of onexit event handler.

I love the idea of having the alternatives appear automatically. when there's only like 3 seconds left.

The time, 15 seconds, is maybe too long when there's really hard questions. I want people to upload easy questions that forces you to think instead of googling.

I'm sort of solved the Backspace problem. I made it so a confirmation box appears if you try to exit the page (unless you click a link)

The time is now 10 seconds instead of 15.

Very fun. I have only one gripe and that is the fact that you have an alert pop up when I try to leave the page. I hate alert messages. Other than that the game is really fun and the questions are difficult enough that I don't think googling would give me much of an edge given the time restriction of each question. Good job.

I want to encourage more questions where thinking is better than googling. Check out this page for tips: http://kwissle.com/help/a-good-question

Long questions with long answers (What is a situation called in which the inflation rate is high and the economic growth rate is low? - stagflation) require more time than short questions with short answers (What herb is used in a Mojito? - mint). I know the answer to both, but I only got the points for one...

It's due to people writing, pardon my french; shit questions. Ideally this is solved by crowd sourcing good reviews that prevent long bad questions like that from getting in. At the moment over-eagerly publishing peoples questions to get the numbers up. Working on.

Please don't require using another service to log in. I hit "Sign in", saw the Google, Twitter, and Facebook buttons, and immediately looked for the "no, I really want to use a username and password" option.

Also, the Twitter authorization requests permission to read tweets and followers; don't do that.

If I had more time I'd build a custom registration but then I'd have to worry about SSL, a registration form, forgotten passwords etc.

On Twitter, I've set it up as Read-Only. That's the minimum I can use. Sorry.

Move the multi choice option after more time: currently it is faster to reply using the multichoice feature instead of typing. Or, another possibility, when a competitor replies using multichoice, don't reject the typed answer as too slow. Anyway nice game, nice idea.

Thanks for the feedback! Note that typing in the answer gives a whole +3 points.

I'll figure out some new rule adjustments once enough feedback is in.

The problem is that you don't get those 3 points if the opponent rushed the multi-choice and got it right. Denying your opponents points is a valid strategy considering the goal is simply to have the most points after 10 questions. Even if I face a very easy question, pressing multi-choice and picking the correct answer is preferable to typing the answer in and possibly being too slow.

You could possibly solve that by making the multi-choice feature buttons use 1 second to work. Basically, I click banana, and 1 second after that the server actually acknowledged my answer.

Fair point. Note taken. I'm hoping once they're more questions and more players online there'll be an option to play with only alternatives or only typed ones. Especially since on an iphone for example it's hard to type as fast as you can on a desktop computer.

Vet your questions better. I do not want to know who the founder of 'Enterprise Rent-A-Car' is. And saying that John Hanson was the first President of the United States is a joke. But otherwise, this game is really fun!

bear with me. The site is in alpha stage and the idea with the questions is that it's crowd sourced. Anybody can review accepted questions but I also want to make it possible to review questions you've just played.

Very fun! Although I played three times and the questions were already starting to repeat...

Unfortunately so. It'll get better once people start contributing more questions.

It's addictive - agree with others, needs more questions, so I'm adding some now myself!

500 internal server error. Is it because i didn't let you have my google account email?

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